Sometimes the hysterical quality in British 'investigative' journalism really makes me laugh.  It is a cliche that any report about something that you know about will have nothing to do with reality - and yet we happily accept media reports on subjects about which we know little or nothing as a reliable source.

Of course, we all rewrite history, fantasise and like to tell a good story - me as much as anyone else - but, without getting all po-faced about it, the power to shape the thoughts and feelings of millions carries some responsibility.

This Blog and other initiatives of ours often try to unravel some of what we have called 'group-think' by giving a new perspective on current events.  It is not that our perspective is always 'right' but that it is wise to consider other perspectives before leaping in with unconditional tribal support for your country, your faith leaders or your party.

These thoughts were especially salient with the report in yesterday's Sunday Times headlined: "Ken's aides 'in secret Marxist cell'" - an attack on the group around Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, especially his economic adviser, Redmond O'Neill. 

The context, of course, is that the Mayoral Elections are coming up. We have already seen an expose by Andrew Gilligan of the Evening Standard of the conduct of one of Livingstone's staff.  Other information we have suggests that what Gilligan has raised is a matter for legitimate concern and the issues have not yet been satisfactorily been dealt with by the Mayor's Office.

Let me make my interest clear. I, once and briefly, advised Livingstone's team during the period when he was trying to stop an unwarranted attempt to stop him from running for Mayor by the New Labour machine - a close knit cadre if ever there was one. The ironies abound.

He left the Labour Party to stand on his own. I left his campaign because I considered (then) that he should not stand against Labour. He then won. I left Labour (though I am back, though lord knows for how much longer) for a variety of reasons, largely to do with process rather than policy. Labour then brought him back into the fold and now he is bosom buddies with the Brown establishment. Such is political life.

My view of Livingstone is that he is highly talented and very intelligent but not a team worker.  His policies are of the authoritarian Left and neglect the indigenous population in favour of giving special favours to ethnic and other identity groups in his coalition. 

Similarly, he is far too much into the circuses part of the 'bread and circuses' aspect of politics but, I concede, he has governed London, with limited powers, in such a way that it is deservedly seen as a world class city that is relatively safe and very vibrant. The fact that it destabilises the economy of the rest of the country is not his fault but the Government's.

So, I respect him but do not 'support' him. The Tory choice of Boris Johnson to oppose him must count as one of the most ill-judged and eccentric decisions in contemporary politics.

Similarly, I have never had time for the Marxism of his advisory team - or the cod-Marxism that underpinned New Labour. Karl Marx was a genius with important insights into society and its structures. There are others who have used Marxist ideology effectively for organisation and the development of new thinking.

Unfortunately, Marxism as a philosophy just does not stand up to scrutiny as anything more than an imposition of yet another unnecessary essentialism on the human condition. Marxists have tended to the lowest common denominator - ideas displacing humanity as power is acquired so that the camps and terror become logical outgrowths of its tendency to centralised command organisation.

And yet, and yet - I have actually worked with the person pilloried by the Sunday Times and its article does not ring true - or rather it sounds like what it is, a bit of political opportunism without context or analysis. 

This or that allegation made by the source [Atma Singh] I cannot vouch for, but two aspects of interpretation do not accord with personal experience - so that this article becomes, like so much in the national media, a case study in 'truth' or the lack of it.

The suggestion is that the Socialist Action membership of Redmond-O'Neill and other members of Livingstone's staff is 'news'. The implication is that Socialist Action is some kind of threat to the community because of its beliefs. The tone of the article suggests that we have here a sinister clique intent on seizure of power by non-democratic means.

Well this is what I know from my own dealings with Mr. O'Neill a decade ago.

Mr. O'Neill and the other Livingstone advisers' affiliation to the 'Trotskyist' (what exegesis that word requires!) Socialist Action is not 'news'. This fact and its close-knit nature was known to everyone in the London and indeed national Labour grassroots movement in the mid-1990s. It is not news.

While Socialist Action was one of many such grouplets on the Left, it operated, as a close-knit clique, no differently from those that eventually came to dominate New Labour or represented Atlanticist thinking such as that of (say) another group I knew well at the time, the Labour Finance & Industry Groups.

Small cliques are what politics has always been about. The Right is no different. Track the membership of the Warwick branch of the Federation of Conservative Students into the euro-sceptic movement or the New Times-Demos link within the New Labour faction and you will see what I mean. I've worked with both of these as well.

There is a more general issue for the public about the transparency and accountability of cliques but, if you do not accept as I do that our system is rotten, then cliques per se are only matters of concern if they are corrupt (which power generally encourages them to be) or they have levels of access that allow them to express their more outrageous fantasies through control of the levers of power ["oh, you mean like the neo-conservatives in the US ... "]

From this point of view, the clique around the initial New Labour faction should worry the public far more than Socialist Action. Perhaps Socialist Action is likely to have been 'corrupted' by now, but not because of what it believes per se but because of what it is - a grouplet with access to power that has been around too long.

But the real reason that Socialist Action is apparently running the Mayor's advisory network is actually quite simple and has nothing to do with their 'Trotskist ideology'.  It has everything to do with their competence and intelligence - they stand out like diamonds in the doo-doo in terms of simple ability to get things done effectively.

That is why Ken Livingstone makes use of this network. Not because he is a Trotskyist (he is not), but because this bunch of 'Trots' deliver for him and so, with the usual caveats, for London.

And why do I know that this group is both good and not very dangerous - why, if anything, they are being used rather than using the system?  Because I worked with Mr. O'Neill for about two years on a particular project and I learnt two things about him.

The first was that he was the finest political tactician and strategist that I have ever come across. He was immensely hard-working, intelligent and capable. Above all, he was honest.  He never broke a promise in a world where promises were created to be broken. He knew how to compromise.

The level of talent and intelligence was so superior that I had to ask myself why he was wasting his time (indeed why I was) on a political project that was quixotic.

The answer came from the second thing I learnt about him - he was a believer, much like an entrepreneur who has to believe in his idea if he is to build a business. In politics, as in business and as in every aspect of life, there are types - the managerial, the entrepreneurial, the creative, the blind follower. Redmond was and probably is a political entrepreneur.

In his case, he believed in a political philosophy that really irritates the establishment. He gave up (at that time) personal comfort, the opportunity to make money and considerable amounts of leisure to drive things in the direction he believed. 

In retrospect, I betrayed him. Why? Because I am not a believer but a pragmatist. The project could go only so far. When it ceased to be effective, I moved on with the mentality of the mercenary rather than the saint. Do I feel guilty? - no, of course not. My time in the City told me that if an investment is not working out, ditch it and move on.

But Redmond, whose political philosophy is (in my opinion) flawed but not malign, did not give up. He went on to stick with Livingstone and, alongside others, he helped to build a credible policy staff where other politicians have surrounded themselves with numskulls. 

In a liberal democratic society, he and his type are no more of a threat than any other small group of dedicated believers who can attach themselves to a rising politician and make things work for him. 

They are only a threat when the system starts to fail and allow such cliques power without restraint - no clique can do damage in the Mayor's Office but a clique that captures the Prime Minister's Office can perform mayhem on a global scale (as we have seen).

There are, in any case, such cliques everywhere. Every American neo-con in town is now attached to Giuliani, while Putin has his silovki. This is politics - cliques competing against cliques. And, up to a point, there is nothing wrong with like-minded people getting together to make things happen. 

There are only two questions to ask within the current system.  Are they competent?  Are they operating within the law?

Of course, if you are a regular reader, you would expect me to have further questions about the depth of democracy and about accountability and transparency in a political culture built on competing cliques.

Ironically, the political project in which I, as a relative right-winger, worked with this alleged 'Trot' was actually about democracy, accountability and transparency. If it had succeeded, it would have transformed politics from a culture of unaccountable cliques to one more transparent and accountable.

It was the critics of Socialist Action who preferred Government by clique. Can we blame Socialist Action for their subsequent adaptation to reality? Yet what of Socialist Action and its position in relation to our two questions? 

The competence question can be judged by the electorate in May as our democratic system dictates. The current round of media attention is only useful if it asks (as Andrew Gilligan has done) the simple question of whether the law has been broken or can point to substantive failures of competence or of policy. 

If there has been a breach of the law, the law should come down on this clique, as it should on any other clique in similar circumstances, 'like a ton of bricks'. Similarly, let us get the facts on competence by all means. But let's not prejudge.

There are two types of good journalism - that which investigates wrong-doing or exposes anomaly and that which informs and analyses.  There are two types of inferior journalism - that which presents an opinion (the 'commentariat') as a substitute for analysis and that which presents 'news' when it is really presenting material to protect or promote a stance.

As It Happens is very often inferior journalism - it enjoys its freebie forays into opinion because its clients pay for the real analysis - but its audience is small and tightly defined with the ability to make its own judgements on our credibility. We soon hear back if we get it really wrong and will tell you if we have.

What we do not need is more web activity that repeats the general round of agit-bloggery nor more mainstream journalism that parrots the political class with instant opinion. 

What we need is a fresh journalism that no longer obsesses about providing instant news access (since the internet provides this willy-nilly) or increasingly hyped up trivial 'angles' on popular stories (that's entertainment).

We need a journalism that offers us, instead, sustained and considered analysis and investigation of the context of news and of the options that we have for dealing with the issues on which we elect governments. But will we get it?

www.tppr.co.uk

Facebook has taken off in the United Kingdom. It has all happened very quickly.  London has the most members of any city in the world at 1.3 million and rising. It had only 175,000 in January. The UK, with around a quarter of the population of the US, is the third largest nation on Facebook and the largest outside North America. It seems that British Facebook members spent around an average of half an hour a day on the site in August.

What is particularly interesting is that it has moved into the metropolitan political and media elite. My own Friends List has three MPs from two parties (although I know I am only dealing personally with two of them) and a slew of middling political journalists and activists. To some extent, this is a fashion phenomenon - a 2007 equivalent of the hula hoop or the Rubik's Cube - but the product has touched a nerve. As with our recent investigation into Second Life, our interest is not in the claims made for the platform by publicists or the hysterical reactions of the increasingly tedious commentariat but what actual participation teaches us about its potential for social and political change.

The first thing to be said about Facebook is that it cannot be understood except in terms of play, of sheer fun. Any claims that it can change the world as it is now should be taken with a pinch of salt. Of course, social networking tools will effect major changes, and we deal with that below, but most people are on the site for self-expression and ludic performance. 

Political groups tend to be poorly maintained. Political discussion is largely absent except in short bursts that can tend to be rants rather than considered opinion. Political activity tends to fall into just three basic categories - the emotional expression of pain or desire in some campaign designed to 'raise consciousness', the provision of basic information about 'real world' meetings and events and the opportunity to create a 'group' amongst like-minded people.  Business effects seem to be similar. 

The platform is really a network of small families each ranging from 10-120 people (beyond which the idea of Friends is meaningless) so that an idea has to be good enough to jump virally from 'family' to 'family' if it is to reach mass communications status. This means that traditional sales messages that contain no intrinsic interest soon fall by the wayside and that emotionalism and jokeyness triumphs over sweet reason. Good comedy writers are going to be worth their weight in gold when viral marketing becomes the norm rather than a marketing sideline.

The qualities of self-expression and play that dominate Facebook are its strength but also represent the weakness of the platform. The 'family' is not a real world network at all. My (real) immediate family is typical in each member having a Facebook account but not permitting any other member of it to be a Friend.  I have only three (out of 67) business contacts and this is also typical because a ludic approach to life does not currently work very well when you are trying to present an image of reliability and professionalism.  

You could choose to make Facebook a real family tool (my wife does this, but excludes immediate family) or a business tool, but you would probably then want to remove such groups as People Who Don't Sleep Enough Because They Stay Up Late for No Reason (which has 199,408 members). You would almost certainly not get to be a vampire or a zombie or have an acquarium or listen to Metallica ... so why bother. Linked-In may be as dull as dishwater but you won't get caught in the office looking foolish as you try to find the right alien for your online planet.

Facebook provides you with a half-baked parallel identity. Instant decision-making that in a MMORPG game might have you winning a magical battle-axe or being wiped out by a blood-sucking demon could result in you looking on Faceboook like a high school nerd rather than the intellectual that you think you are. You choose Friends (or have them thrust upon you, accepted in a weak moment), write a Profile, join Groups and use Applications that can define you very quickly.  But, while this is not the 'real' you, because a lot of the choices are free choices that you cannot have in the real world, it may be more the real inner you than the real social you outside. Your Facebook identity becomes a volatile hybrid entity existing somewhere between the really real person and the fantastically real you - which is perhaps what you like to think you would be if you had Blofeld's wealth and 007's looks and charisma. Or have I lost you at this point!?

This makes it an appallingly difficult tool to manage in a business or political context.   It is anarchic in its effects unless you are prepared to dedicate many working hours to constructing your identity to order. Frankly, why bother because, as we have found, its social utility in the real world is fairly limited. The best strategy is generally just to go with the flow and have fun.

Take political campaigning. Over 400,000 people signed up to a group supporting the Saffron Monks in Burma. Did it make any difference to the actual structures of power in Rangoon? No. It was the emotional gut reaction of lots of sweet, naive, feeling people - the international relations equivalent of the 'Diana effect'. But you don't change the world through expressions of emotion, only through hard work and organisation directed at the acquisition of the levers of power. Such emotion expressed by clicking a mouse may even be positively dangerous in dealing with complex real world issues.  The latest posting on the Burma group expresses the deep despair of nice people faced with hard reality: "whats been happening is so unjust... lets just hope and pray it all gets sorted out." Yes, well, precisely.

In fact, some single issue campaigns that can get significant numbers of Facebook people within a national territory to sign up to a very specific and focused Group can make the platform work in effecting change. The Group Offer Asylum to Iraqis Working for the British Armed Forces is typical in being part of an integrated campaign that is forcing some semblance of morality on to an a-moral government but this Group is only a small part of a wider whole, involving lobbying, events, media relations, blogs and collateral.

We set up an experimental local political group and we learnt the following. A Facebook group is useful for centralising information amongst a pre-existing group of activists but it requires constant maintenance, is difficult to market within Facebook and is impossible to use outside Facebook. An activist group that treats Facebook as a tool for information exchange still has to direct activists into Facebook to make use of it and it cannot use it to reach people outside the platform. 

There is a massive contradiction between the needs of serious political education to reach as many people as possible and organise them and Facebook's privacy rules. These rules restrict actual organisation to the very few and then de-link mass propaganda and information from the organisational process. Most political and media Facebook Groups, set up in a fit of enthusiasm, are soon neglected by their creators and the 'members' drift away - the numbers of groups that just sit there uselessly is increasing by the day and, once an account holder notices they are clogging up their own group lists, they get removed. Once these removals start, the process starts to continue remorselessly as others fail to see the point in being part of something for 'losers'. 

What does seem to be working are the cultural interest groups.Some of the liveliest groups on my list seem to be in the faith sector - not only Christian but esoteric.  Even here, the same rules apply - the creator of the Group has to engage with an audience that must to a great extent have pre-existed in the real world.

For business, Facebook is a challenge on many grounds. This playground offers a number of threats - identity theft (although this has been much exaggerated and can be dealt with through implementing a very few simple precautions), leak of confidential material, negative commentary, time-wasting and defamation.  For us to say that it is largely a playground will encourage an instinct to ban it in the work-place if only because most business and professional people are terrified of 'smelling the roses on the way' in case it undermines their anxious and inherited work ethic. Maybe some arty-farty ad agency can encourage playfulness but not a law firm.

In fact, this may be a mistake. Facebook is expressing something very real in the public's desire to be playful. To expect the work-place in a modern services economy to operate along dour Reithian lines is to ask for trouble later in terms of human resources. Younger people actually work very hard but they also play hard. They increasingly blur the edges of their lives so that where love, work, family, life and culture were once separate spheres, they are now becoming one fluid process of multiple identity where anything goes so long as the job is done, the children are happy and everyone eats regularly. It is not necessarily a happy world. It is an anxious world - and play (as with small children) is what you do to exorcise fear as well as learn.

More to the point, social networking operations (like Second Life) may be primarily a game but Facebook is the path-finder to a much broader revolution in communications and social organisation that will be far more functional in purpose. Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and other similar brands will survive as mass tools but the future of organisations almost certainly lies in the adaptation of these technologies to more focused ends. 

Emotional campaigning and tiny activist groups may mean that Facebook's actual influence on policy is limited but, eventually, social networking tools will be adapted to political organisation. Our view remains that existing political organisations may eventually be swept aside by bottom-up operations that remove the decadent intellectual class and the commentariat much as the arrival of printing removed the priestly caste - but these effects will take decades to unfold, will undoubtedly see a fight-back [no doubt as a claimed Re-Enlightenment] and may not be as automatically 'liberal' on both sides of the game as the advocates of change may assume. 

Business, too, can and will use social networking tools as means of unlocking the intellectual potential within organisations (at least in the services sector) in ways that may be threatening to upper level managers and professionals (though not to the highest levels of all). The essence of social networking is that the primary user has to inspire others to engage in the network and that the operation will die naturally when it ceases to have a function. Secure small social networks of committed persons cutting across the usual boundaries within a corporation and set specific tasks will transform management responses to the market. The controlled anarchy of such systems will require new thinking that will need new unconventional management theories.

Still, these changes are not going to happen over night. Those who leap into bed with social networking tools too rapidly are going to get very burnt. Fortunately, the very nature of the tool permits small-scale experimentation and conditions where a thousand flowers may bloom. A sort of survival of the fittest will privilege flexible and creative minds over command-and-control. The creative destruction of capitalism will continue regardless.

One final lesson of our adventures in the crazy world of Facebook is that these new technologies are very content heavy. Just because intellectuals as a class are on their way out, does not mean that intellectual skills will not be at a premium. You could say that everyone (holding down a serious job) will have to learn to become an intellectual and to have a reasoned opinion. Thirty years ago, I would not have been taught philosophy at high school because it was useless - such studies were reserved for those such as me at Oxbridge so that I could rule a non-existent empire wisely. Now, my son studies the difference between Plato and Aristotle in the first year of his sixth form. The numbers being trained to think are growing and will offer a standing threat to a complacent elite.

Intellectual effort is required not so much to set up the technology as to know what you want from the technology and how you can make technology work for you - IT people are no longer grunts and despised geeks, they are partners and facilitators for your vision. The actual cost of delivery (as technology) is going to be miniscule compared to the cost of content maintenance, group facilitation, evaluation and then ensuring that knowledge exchange becomes effected as action.  Under a worst case scenario, there will be lots of playful happy bunnies running around with bright ideas and no system to evaluate the costs, make the changes happen and keep the system running by offering intelligent feed-back. This is not going to happen because the market will not let it happen. Welcome to the new world of co-operative ludic capitalism ... have fun!

www.tppr.co.uk

www.pendrywhite.com

A new bestseller in China, Currency Wars, published by a unit of the state-owned CITIC Group presents an elaborate conspiracy theory centred on the Rothschilds. The details can be read elsewhere - much of it will be familiar to those of us forced to trawl the lower reaches of the internet.

Any conspiracy theory that mentions the famous European-Jewish banking dynasty touches a raw nerve in the West, given its guilt over the complicity of a chunk of Europe in the attempted murder of a whole ethnic community, let alone the Roma, gays and as many Slavs as the German Army of the East could cope with. Cynically, some might even consider Chinese interest in this material (which is typically more associated with right-wing Japanese visions of the universe) as a pitch for emerging market hearts and minds, especially in the Middle East.

In fact, it appears that the Chinese have simply latched on to an existing conspiracy theory that we suspect they partly believe themselves without fully understanding why Westerners get so edgy about it. The worst that might be said is that 'conservative' policy-makers in Beijing thought that it might be quite useful to have author Mr. Song Hongbing's theories in the political marketplace to influence a domestic debate.

In our view, the propaganda war between East and West is in danger of getting out of hand but the West cannot whine too much. Nonsense from China is an understandable reaction to a great deal of similar nonsense that has emanated from Western (largely Israeli, French and Anglo-Saxon) ‘black operations’ over recent years – something about reaping and sowing is in order here but 'nuff said. In fact, Jewish reaction in the UK is mature. The (European) Jewish community recognizes that the Chinese in no way intend anti-semitism (unlike many Japanese versions of the myth) and that the Chinese admire Jewish acumen. Song Hongbing is explicit on this matter according to Wednesday's Financial Times report.

Closer analysis suggests that the book is important because it arrives at a point of tension within some serious economic policy debates inside China. There is a powerful higher-level lobby for opening up China to the global economy.  Throughout the emerging world, technically-trained elites are trying to integrate their countries into the global economy but are finding it hard to bring mid-level policy-makers and 'conservatives' along with them. Traditional nationalist sentiment, here as elsewhere, sees US pressure, in this case to float the renminbi and open up the financial system, as just another form of ‘looting’. The Western drive for political and economic liberalization is coming up against often legitimate national suspicions of the motives for reform.  It is for the West to let these countries work out for themselves where the benefit to them of global integration actually lies and if a 'nonsense' conspiracy theory contributes to bringing that debate into the open, then why not?  The Diana conspiracy theory brought into the open serious concerns about social modernisation in the UK in the late 1990s without causing the fall of a Monarchy that is now stronger than ever.

The author (basically a Chinese-American geek without formal historical training) seems to have put some web conspiracy material into a plausible framework. His work appeals to a widespread need for narratives that explain what is going on in the world where otherwise there is silence. Conspiracy theories fill gaps in official information and public education.

Professional history should be treated with caution.  The ‘evidence’ is not always what it appears to be and silences are meaningful too. Historians can be more or less fact-based mythmakers. That silences can be meaningful is a little too Zen-like for Oxbridge-trained minds to comprehend. The conservative English school represented by Andrew Roberts and others is 'good history' but it also presents a narrative with a purpose, a set of judgements about what it is important to write about, that has contributed to the formation of this generation's ideology as much as anything Marxist did to that of the 1960s. 

The post-modern attitude to truth easily moves from a situation based on narratives that conform to what facts are available to ones in which the gaps between facts are not ignored but are filled with increasingly imaginative surmise. At this stage, the balance between evidence and interpretation shifts. If the market does not need a new narrative, the narrative stays lurking in the lower swamps of the internet. If it does, then it gets integrated into a text (as author Song Hongbing has done with Currency Wars), published and distributed as ‘a truth’.

We should not get too scandalized or po-faced about this. There are cases where the narrative is an outrageous lie – the narrative of Holocaust Denial is the most obvious example of this and deeply hurtful to the victims of German national socialism.  Similarly, Japanese historiography has been wilfully neglectful of crimes against the Chinese people: but then so, until the last decade, has British about mass bombing and the conduct of Allied troops in Germany in 1945/1946. A new invented narrative might be regarded as a form of art that tells us some cultural truth that concentrates minds on the deeper stresses and strains in a society. For example, much of the conservative British school’s writing represents an ideology of Atlantic superiority and a repeated assertion of the vileness of other systems – with an often wilful refusal to engage with uncomfortable issues surrounding British conduct outside its heartland.

More could be written on this and we may return to the matter on another occasion – but Currency Wars should be seen not as an occasion for panic (as the sensible low key reaction of the Board of Deputies of British Jews has shown) but as an opportunity to ask questions about why this particular vision of the world is important at this time, how it may impact on serious policy debate (probably marginally) and how mass narratives are now constructed out of the internet instead of by often equally ideologically-committed professionals working in libraries.